


parallelism

by banjjakz



Series: into the woods [1]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Crying, Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Drabble, Fluff, Gender-Neutral Apprentice (The Arcana), Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Other, Quiet, Slow Burn, apprentice gets a little upset and muri tries his best to comfort them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 07:44:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19437010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banjjakz/pseuds/banjjakz
Summary: There’d been a point where he would have sent you home hours ago. There’d been a point where you would have taken that personally.Now, you find yourself soaking up the warmth of the fireplace he keeps stoked mostly for your benefit; curled underneath a borrowed pelt, cheeks rosy from both the heat and the knowledge that you’re more contented than you can ever remember being.





	parallelism

All is quiet. You’d arrived just upon sundown, perhaps a rather dangerous time to be traipsing along the path to Muriel’s hut - what with a fiending, devilish ghost-goat running amok - but work at the shop had kept you until it had been hours past the time you’d intended to set out. 

Nevertheless, Muriel had let you in regardless of your tardiness, regardless of the fact that it was nearing his bedtime. The sleepy set of his features when he’d opened the door almost tempts you to start coming later on purpose, if only to catch him at his softest, the harsh lines and contours of his face rounded into a smooth, edgeless expanse of rare unguardedness. 

Inanna curls up at the foot of the bed in as deep a slumber as Muriel himself. They both snore softly, quietly. It’s more white noise than it is a disturbance, and you find yourself lulled into even more of a relaxed demeanor in your comfortable little huddle by the fireplace. 

In this rare moment of contemplative solitude, you take the liberty to survey the state of Muriel’s living quarters, to appreciate the level of intimacy and trust granted to you to even be able to do this, let alone while Muriel himself is asleep with his back turned to you. It says a lot about how far the both of you have come. There’d been a point where he would have sent you home hours ago. There’d been a point where you would have taken that personally.

Now, you find yourself soaking up the warmth of the fireplace he keeps stoked mostly for your benefit; curled underneath a borrowed pelt, cheeks rosy from both the heat and the knowledge that you’re more contented than you can ever remember being.

You let your gaze roam around the place, taking notice of all the little details that point to Muriel’s life - details you never stop appreciating, some details that surprise you even after the hundredth time surveying them: the frayed ends of the wooden broom that rests innocently in the corner (you’ll have to buy him a new one at the market), the makeshift kettle of tea that still sits next to the fireplace from your earlier dinner (made of roasted vegetation and eggs), the new wood material he’s using for his whittling (it almost looks like birch, if you aren’t mistaken.)

These little clues speak volumes about his personality, his character. What is left unsaid in between awkward pauses and long silences are damn near shouted at you inside this little hut. It is so undeniably, unequivocally _Muriel_ that it’s almost stifling in its intensity.

The rug is soft and worn underneath the anxious fidgeting of your bare feet. Muriel lies still in bed, not ten feet away. Your hands twitch with want.

 _No,_ you tell yourself. Him allowing you to spend the night was as much vulnerability you expected him to lend you for the rest of the harvest season. You musn’t overstay your welcome.

Yet still…

His slumbering form seems to call to you as though a siren enticing a weak, desperate sailor. With every measured rise and fall of his chest, the urge to go and lay beside him grows stronger and stronger within you until you find yourself rising from your comfortable cross-legged seat in front of the fire. Before you can think to stop, you’ve made it over to the low, impossibly soft mattress, and you seat yourself lightly next to Muriel. Ever the sensitive sleeper, he shifts slightly at the new addition of weight beside him, and you must hold your breath and keep very still before he settles once more.

Asleep like this, he looks...serene, almost. Unworried. Relieved of all the anxiety he carries with him every waking moment. It makes you physically ill, sometimes - the thought of just how heavy he is; not of body mass, but of trauma. You don’t know exactly what happened to him, but you aren’t stupid, either. You can piece together the basic gist of it, and that alone fills you with a myriad of emotions that probably don’t even hold a candle to what Muriel himself must go through, day in and day out.

Sighing quietly, you bring a hand to smooth out the faint wrinkle between his brows. Even in slumber he still carries with him the stress of the living. 

Your fingers then fall to the scar running perpendicular to his cheekbone. It’s so deep that the tissue is braised, slightly, colored like the inside of raw meat. The jagged line pierces the beginnings of his stubbly beard and dips down beneath it, curving until it eventually tapers off at the crest of his jaw. Gently, you follow its course until you’re cradling his face in the palm of your hand, thumb rising to stroke as far as it can reach (which, admittedly, isn’t very far.)

It’s easy to get caught up in running your fingers over the features you’d dreamt of caressing for months now, easier still to convince yourself that you’ll get away with it if the universe loves you. As Muriel cracks his eyes open after a particularly gentle drag over his cheek, you curse both the cosmos and your very conception.

To your surprise, he does not flinch violently back like you had been expecting - he doesn’t even remove his head from your hand; he does, however, flush ruby down to his roots. 

“What are you doing.” Spoken not with contempt, but perhaps a little bit of alarm. 

You have the decency to blush at being caught. “Nothing,” you whisper, touch still lingering on the curve of his jaw. He’s silent for more than a few moments, but when you go to remove your hand, his own lifts from where it had been lying limply on the bed to clamp over yours and hold it in place. It completely eclipses your own.

“Muriel…?”

“I didn’t...say stop.” 

He averts his gaze from your own, face burning an even brighter red than before. It makes your chest melt in on itself . 

It is a testament to how much of his trust you’ve earned to be able to do this: _this_ meaning caress his face while he sleeps, only to have him wake up during the middle of it and hold you there, telling you not to stop, blushing and stammering all the while. 

But _this_ also means spending the night; _this_ also means Inanna not even batting an eye at you perched on the bed; _this_ also means being let into the hut in the first place, both as a first-time and returning visitor.

You can’t help but marvel at what a privilege it is to be where you are, with whom you are with. How many people get to do this?

Stroking his cheek once more, this time with a low hum kicking up in the bass of his chest, you think to yourself, _not many. Not many, at all._

And you couldn’t be any more grateful.

  
  
  


The marketplace is as hustling and bustling as it always is, packed to the brim with locals and travellers alike, all dying for the wares exclusive to Vesuvia and her unique, gifted charms.

You’re here to buy a loaf of pumpkin bread for Muriel, as a thank-you gift of sorts to show your gratitude for him allowing you to stay the night. It had been late when you arrived and, although he didn’t have to, he still lent you his hearth (and, later, his wide collection of furs.)

By now, you and the baker are well acquainted. You barely even have to wait five minutes before the bread is in your hands, hot and steaming through the thin parchment paper it’s delivered in. You thank him with an extra few coins added onto the standard charge and go about your way, turning down the familiar back-alleyway that takes you straight to the forest’s edge.

From there, it doesn’t take long until you’re well into the thick of the trees. You can’t lie - walking the forest alone nowadays fills you with a fear closer to genuine fright than just mere apprehension, but it cannot be helped. This is the only place far away enough from the city for Muriel’s peace of mind, and so this is the place to which you shall trek. 

Still. It’s hard to keep up a facade of bravery when you’re suddenly aware of another presence looming closer and closer, with a rapid footfall raining down in tandem. Your heart begins to pound as you shrug your winter cloak tighter around your person, looking this way and that to try and locate the source of the sound.

Lucio had never been the type to sprint up on you, preferring the element of surprise, although he _did_ like to relish in the fear of his prey; is that what he’s doing? Working you up for a fright?

You are so caught up in trying to anticipate him that you are wholly unprepared for the impact to your upper torso, knocking you back down onto the ground. You groan as your head bounces off of the solid earth, teeth shaking in your skull, as a...tongue licks the right side of your face?

Peering up, you are met with the familiar sight of Inanna sat on top of you, panting with her tongue lolled out.

“You scared me!”

She snuffs, apparently nonplussed by your accusatory tone, and instead takes far more interest in the loaf of pumpkin bread clutched for dear life in your right hand. “Oh, no you don’t,” you warn, attempting to extend your arm out of reach from her snapping teeth; unfortunately, it slips your mind that she is a skilled predator weighing about twice your weight in muscle, and she effortlessly pitches forward to bite a sizeable chunk off of the snack.

_“No!”_

But the damage is done. Over half of it is now gone, swallowed by an innocently blinking Inanna.

You sigh, getting up on trembling legs and trying your best to brush the forest floor from your clothes. It’s a fruitless endeavor, however, because the dirt and smaller pieces of debris refuse to dislodge themselves. Your hair is probably in an equal state of disarray from the scuffle. Your hand is still wet and dripping with Inanna’s slobber.

It’s been a long afternoon. You’re tired, and dirty, and cold, and still vaguely shaken up from the bone-rattling fear you’d felt back there, completely and utterly unprepared and unwilling for a battle with the Count. By the time the two of you make it to Muriels’s front door, it takes every fiber of your being not to cry because you know it would make him viscerally uncomfortable.

Yet, the second he opens his door upon your knock and you’re greeted with his wide-eyed look of innocent surprise, you feel the tears surge forward; not falling, but hanging off of the crest of your lashes in a vaguely formed threat.

“I-I had brought this for you,” you hold up the half-eaten hunk of cold pumpkin bread, “but Inanna jumped me for it and now it’s gone cold and hard and I hadn’t thought to bring anything else and I...don’t know why I’m still talking. I’m rambling. I’m sorry.”

A beat of silence passes. Then two, then three, then many more.

Inanna shuffles at your side.

Then,

“Come inside.”

Muriel steps back through the threshold and holds the door open for you in probably what is the first blatantly open invitation into his home that you can ever recall.

Embarrassed, you bow your head as you shuffle forward, the wolf trotting behind you. She even nudges you forward, the cheeky thing, until you’re stumbling onto the rug you’d fallen asleep on just the night before. Your pelt of furs still lies in the same position you’d left them.

A heavy hand comes down on your shoulder. You don’t dare to look up, afraid that if you do, your tears will fall.

The hand rises and falls once more, and then repeats the action long enough for you to piece together what he’s trying to do. Is he...patting you?

“Don’t apologize,” Muriel says shortly, although not unkindly. If anything, his tone is the softest you’ve ever heard it - almost like he’s afraid of speaking too loudly, lest he upset you even further.

“Sorry,” you say again, like a fool, and then you cringe at your mistake. “I mean--”

He breathes a small sigh, hand still planted firmly on your shoulder before fluttering uncertainly down to your elbow, and then your forearm, and then finally settling for loosely locking around your wrist. “It’s OK.” And then, quieter: “You got bread...For me…?”

You nod and hold up the half-mauled hunk, still refusing to look at him. “Yes, but as I said, it’s--”

Quickly, before you can even react, it’s snatched from your hands and your head snaps up, only to be met with the sight of Muriel ripping a sizeable chunk out of the bread - so sizeable, in fact, that he tears off some of the parchment paper used to hold it.

“Muriel!” You exclaim, “Inanna bit that!”

He shrugs, indifferent, although the flush on his face tells another story entirely. “‘S good.”

You know he’s lying through his curled lips. The bread had been cold, and hard, and wet with wolf slobber, its insides exposed to the bitter condition of a pseudo-wintry forest. It was good for little more than kindling.

And still, Muriel had eaten it like he was starved. 

Crumbs litter his stubble from where he’d so wholeheartedly bit into the loaf. Your heart constricts dangerously. “C’mere,” you say gently, as you raise a hand to wipe his face clean. It is only when your palm connects with the crook of his jaw do you feel an acute sense of dé jà vu, especially when he flushes a red so brilliant it almost looks uncomfortable.

Carefully, making no sudden movements so as not to startle him, you brush your thumb through the lingering mess of bread.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Maybe there’s only one or two small pieces of bread. Maybe you just wanted an excuse to hold his face in your hands again, feel the familiar weight of his solidly sturdy structure against your touch.

“Are you done,” he asks, eyes closed.

“Do you wish for me to be?”

Muriel furrows his eyebrows in what you’ve learned to interpret as bashfulness. “Stop asking questions.”

“Oh? I can’t ask questions anymore?”

“Yes. I mean, No. I mean--” Curiously, he begins to perspire at his temples. “Go away.”

You titter good-naturedly, and belatedly realize that all of your tears and tension of the past have all but vanished - due wholly in part to the man standing in front of you. “Thank you,” you murmur quietly, gaze softening.

He startles as his eyes open. “Huh? ...For what.”

“For being you.”

You don’t know what you expect his reaction to be, but it isn’t a dark scoff. “I don’t know why you’d thank me for that.” He turns his head and your hand falls lamely back to your side.

“Well, I am.” You take his hand and silently rejoice when he doesn’t shake it away. “So, please. Let me.”

A moment of silence.

Then,

“...I’m not stopping you.”

It’s as close to an acquiesce as you’ll get, and you gladly take it. The smile on your face must be bright; Muriel even graces you with a ghost of his own, and doesn’t that start something hot and electric coursing through your veins - a new sensation, definitely. 

But not a bad one.

As Muriel shoos Inanna off the bed so he can sit and resume what looks to be another one of his works of whittling, you curl up by the fireplace, yet again, and relish in the warmth that exists in this tiny pocket of the woods - otherwise discoverable to the naked eye, yet offered up to you over and over and over again. If you aren’t careful, you could make this place a second home of sorts.

The fireplace lulls you into drifting off. The last thing you’re conscious of is a touch at your jaw, and a rough, calloused sensation sweeping across your cheekbone, although it had probably been just a trick of your sleep-addled mind.

**Author's Note:**

> hi.. this is my first time writing for this fandom >< im pretty new, sorry if i got anything wrong..!  
> my tumblr is [@myrrheart](https://myrrheart.tumblr.com) and i take headcanon requests and prompts!


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